First In Line
An author must feel enormous pressure to nail the first line of a book. Here are some of our favorites ...
"This is the most beautiful place on earth." Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
"When she woke, she was red." When She Woke by Hillary Jordan
"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to the wall and being tortured." Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untiled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek." The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
"Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day." Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
"Sometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp dicovered in his parents' freezer — a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room — an old man frozen in a block of ice." The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern
"She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him." The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful." Underworld by Don DeLillo
"Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing." The Egoist by George Meredith
"He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle." Doc by Mary Doria Russell
